This paper describes
an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that women have larger colour vocabularies than men.The results indicate that they do.The results also indicate that, in at least
one social class, younger men have larger colour
vocabularies than do older men.No such
difference exists for women.However, a
group of Catholic nuns did score lower than the rest of the women but still
higher than the men.

INTRODUCTION

It is a widely held belief that women have
larger colour vocabularies than do men. For example,
Robin Lakoff (1975) states this as a fact and
suggests as an explanation the observation that in this
society women spend much more of their time on colour-related
activities such as choosing clothes than men do.The purpose of our study was to see whether
women really do use a wider array of colour terms
than men do by presenting colours to both men and
women, asking them to name them, and then measuring the size of the
vocabularies they use.

At least two related types
of observations have been reported in the literature. The first deals with
differences between men and women on other colour-related
tasks; the second involves other differences between the language of men and
that of women, suggesting that if men and women do differ in their vocabulary
of colour, it would not be the only area in which
their languages differ.

The Wordswoth-Wells
colour naming test (Wordsworth and Wells, 1911) tests
the speed of recognition of standard colours.
Subjects are presented with a card showing 100 patches of colour
each 1 cm. square. Each patch is either red, yellow,
green, blue, or black.The subject is
timed as he names the colours of the patches in
order. Wordsworth and Wells reported that among college students
women do better at the task than men, i.e., they require less time.Ligon (1932)
discovered that among children in grades one through nine girls do better on
the Wordsworth-Wells test than do boys. He also showed that, except in the
first two grades, the sex difference was greater on the colour-naming
test than on a test of word reading designed to measure general verbal fluency,
on which girls also did better than boys. This study shows that at least some
of the differences between men and women are acquired at a very early age.

There is a large amount of
evidence that the language of women is not always the same as the language of
men. The anthropological literature abounds in instances of sexual
differentiation of language among so-called primitive people.Jespersen (1922) discusses the language of
the Caribbeans of the small Antilles, in which about
one tenth of the vocabulary is different for women than for men. The
differences occur primarily in kinship terms, names for parts of the body, and
also in isolated words such as friend, enemy, joy, work, war, house, garden,
bed, poison, tree, sun, moon, sea, and earth. In Koasati,
an American Indian language (Haas, 1944), men's and women's speech differ in
some forms of verbal paradigms.

It has long been
recognized that in English, men's and women's speech differ with respect to the
use of swear words and euphemisms.There
is evidence that other differences exist as well.Barren (1971) reports a
difference between the speech of men and women in the relative frequency of
various cases.

This paper describes an
experiment that was conducted to determine whether colour
vocabulary is another area in which men's and women's speech differ.

PROCEDURE

A set of 25 cards was
constructed by colouring a two-inch square in the centre of each of 25 3x5 cards. The squares were coloured with single crayons selected from Crayola's box of
64 crayons. No crayon was used more than once.

Each subject was shown the
cards one at a time and asked to state the word or phrase he would use to
describe the colour.In order to standardize the task, each subject was told that he should
imagine himself in the following situation:

"You have bought a
shirt and now want to buy a pair of pants to match the shirt. You go into a
store but haven't got the shirt with you. You want to say to the sales-person,
'I have a —— shirt. Show me a pair of pants to go with it.' "

The subjects were also
told that they should attempt to describe the cards as independently as
possible, that they should not compare them to each other, and that it was
acceptable to give the same name to more than one card.

The responses were
recorded and then scored using a scheme designed to measure the extent of the
subjects' colour vocabularies. The responses were
divided into four categories:

(2)Qualified—a
basic word qualified by words such as light or dark or by
anotherbasic word, e.g. yellowish
green. Responses in this category are more specific than basic responses
but they do not actually show a larger vocabulary.

(4)Fancy—colour words not in the basic category, such as lavender,
magenta, andchartreuse.

A score for each subject
was computed by assigning one point for each basic response, two for each
qualified, three for each qualified fancy, and four for each fancy response.
Since there were 25 cards, the possible scores range from 25 to 100.

The subjects were divided
into five groups on the basis of age, sex, and occupation as follows:

Group I: men aged 20-35.
Graduate students or people working in technical areas.

Group IV: women aged 45-60.
Most of them married to the men in Group II.

Group V: Catholic nuns. Most of them over 30.

The Mann-Whitney U test
(Siegel, 1956) was used to determine, on the basis of the observed scores, the
probability that the scores of one group were stochastically higher than those
of another group.

The groups ranged in size
from seven to 24 subjects. The size of the groups is taken into account in the
Mann-Whitney test.

RESULTS

Table 1 displays the median scores for each
of the five groups. It suggests that:

(1)Women use fancier words than men.

(2)Younger men use fancier words than older men.

(3)All the women have similar size vocabularies except the
nuns, who use fewer fancy words than the other women.

The
Mann-Whitney test indicates that these differences are highly significant.
Table 2 shows the significance levels obtained for the hypotheses that certain
groups score higher than others. The following comparisons yielded no
significant difference:

(1)Technical v. non-technical young women.

(2)Young women v. older women.

Because
the only significant difference among the women was between the nuns and the
non-nuns, groups III and IV will be combined for the rest of this discussion.

Table
3 shows the average number of times the members of each of the groups used each
category of colour word.It shows that the women used more qualified
fancy and fancy words than did the men, and the older men used significantly
fewer fancy words than did the younger men.It also shows that the nuns used fewer fancy words than did the lay
women.

Another
measure of breadth of vocabulary is the number of times the same term was used
to describe different colours. Table 4 shows the mean
number of times a colour was described exactly the
same way as a previous colour. The older men used the
greatest number of repetitions, followed by the younger men, the nuns, and then
the rest of the women.Thus both the
fanciness score and the repeat count produce the same ordering of the groups.

Table 1

Group

Score

I

(young men)

56

II

(older men)

47

III

(young women)

65

A
(technical)

66

B
(non-technical)

64

IV

(older women)

65

V

(nuns)

60

Table 2

Groups

Sig

III + IV > I + II (women
> men)

0.999

I > II (young men > older men)

0.969

IV > II (older women > older men)

0.984

IlIa > I
(young tech women > young tech men)

0.997

III + IV > V (other women >
nuns)

0.973

Table 3

basic

qualified

qual. fancy

fancy

I + II (all men)

6.3

9.7

3.7

5.4

I (young men)

6.1

8.9

3.8

6.2

II (older men)

6.7

12.3

3.6

2.4

III
+ IV (lay women)

4.4

7.5

5.6

7.5

V (nuns)

4.7

9.8

4.2

6.2

Table 4

Groups

Number of Repeats

I + II (all men)

2.68

I (young men)

2.54

II
(older men)

3.14

III + IV (lay women)

1.09

V (nuns)

1.38

DISCUSSION

It was suspected at the
start of the experiment that factors other than sex might have a significant effect
on people's colour vocabularies. For that reason, the
groups were further subdivided by age and occupation. It is very difficult, however, to construct samples with no differences
other than sex since, in this culture, sex is so highly correlated with other
things.For example.
GroupsII and IV differ by sex, but also, not coincidentally, in the
occupations of the people, the men working at technical jobs, the women having
raised children.In fact, it has been
assumed (for example, by Lakoff) that such
sex-correlated differences are the reason for the differences in colour vocabulary. Women spend more time buying clothes and
decorating living rooms. This study shows, however, that even when the
principal occupation is the same (Group I v. Group IIIa)
the women show a larger colour vocabulary than the
men.

The fact that the nuns
score lower than the rest of the women also suggests that such cultural factors
are significant. Not only do the nuns spend less time worrying about clothes
(the ones in this experiment still wear habits) than do the other women, they
are people who chose to give up such things.Both the fact that the nuns do score higher than the men and that women
score higher than men, even if their current principal occupation is the same,
suggest that this difference is determined quite early in life before adult
occupations are chosen.

The difference between the
young men and the older men was surprising. There are at least two possible
explanations for this observation.One
is that the older men at one time had larger colour
vocabularies but over the many years they have been married and therefore had
someone else to buy their clothes and decorate their living rooms, their
vocabularies have atrophied. The other explanation is that younger men have
larger colour vocabularies than the older men ever
had because sex stereotyping is dwindling in this society and men are
increasingly interested in such things as clothes. The data obtained in this
experiment provide no way to decide between the two.

The goal of this
experiment was to measure size of active vocabulary. It is difficult to do
precisely that in an experimental situation where people are explicitly asked
to name colours. Such a situation was necessary,
however, in order to get each subject's reaction to many different colours.The method
chosen almost certainly produces a bias toward more exotic descriptions than
the subjects would use in an everyday situation.However this bias is constant across all
groups of subjects and should therefore not significantly affect the relative
scores of the various groups.

CONCLUSIONS

The evidence collected in
this experiment confirms the hypothesis that women have more extensive colour vocabularies than men. It also indicates that, at least
in one social class, younger men have larger colour
vocabularies than older men.